As we have seen in the previous chapters, setting up an EC2 instance can be pretty easy and accomplished quickly with a few mouse clicks. AWS Marketplace has a number of AMIs that are available ready-made for deployment. The AWS Marketplace also offers a range of AMIs from vendors such as SAP, Zend, and Microsoft, as well as open source ones, customized for mission-critical projects, such as DevOps and NAS:

1. We will begin by searching for the Ubuntu Linux AMI in the AWS Marketplace:

We will use the latest Ubuntu AMI available at the time of writing, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - Bionic.

The preceding screenshot shows the following information:

• • The version of the AMI that we are using (18.04 LTS)
  • Instance types available for Ubuntu, along with the per-hour pricing for each instance 
  • An overview and details of the AMI

2. On the next page, we select the instance type for our AMI:

3. AWS has a free tier eligible instance for Ubuntu called t2.micro that runs on 1 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, which is sufficient for this tutorial. Ensure that t2.micro has been selected and click on Next.

We have configured the RAM and the CPU of our EC2 instance. In the following section, we'll learn about configuring its network and VPC settings.